A New Year with more traveling and growing and laughing

So yesterday, Soner and I celebrated our two year anniversary. We have been dating for two whole years. It is amazing and I do not remember the time flying by so quickly. i feel as if we haven't even been dating a year! I had a lot of fun preparing for it. I bought these great big heart shaped leaves (I thought they were Elephant Ears but they are not) to show that obviously, my heart and love for Soner is much much larger than his as everyone should know and I set to work on cooking and baking A-L-L D-A-Y L-O-N-G!!


I cooked and I baked, cooked and baked,..literally going back and forth between several different things at once. I prepared bell peppers and celery for Tabouli (it is a "clean eating" recipe) and also prepared eggplants and potatoes (I am learning...the eggplants and potatoes are for tonight's dinner actually but it said I could prepare some of it ahead so I did) while at the same time trying to figure out where in the world I was going to find baking soda! That was my last missing ingredient. You know how everyone says, well duh!, of course they will have that in France, well they don't! They don't have baking soda or sour cream or any differing kinds of heavy or whipped cream as far as I can tell. They don't have popcorn you can buy in a box with more than one package and they don't have what we call steak tenderloin. They have Filet and Faux Filet and Entrecote,..all of which I cannot tell you exactly what it is because supposedly Faux Filet is Sirloin and supposedly Entrecote is Sirloin,..why would you have Sirloin and Sirloin right next to each other in the grocery store?? What they do have is about 8 different types of flour used for a bajillion different types of things whether you want cake flour, pastry flour, bread flour, cookie flour and on and on and on and half a row in the cold section devoted entirely to butter (Think long Walmart aisles!)! I had quite a time the other day looking up all the ingredients I would need for the next few days and then another hour and a half going through the grocery store trying to find them. They do not put tomato paste and tomato puree next to the tomatoes in the canned vegetable section by the way..I am not quite sure where they put them actually but they are not there and they do not put baking soda in the baking section because they do not cook with baking soda because it is "old fashioned" and they keep their melting and baking chocolate with the chocolate, not with the baking. You can actually find (Soner joked the day before to look for baking soda in the toothpaste section since toothpaste is made with baking soda sometimes and he was right!) baking soda at the pharmacy and luckily, I realized this about 20 minutes before they closed for their two hour lunch break yesterday.

So anyways back to the cooking, after I had prepared the ingredients for Tabouli and for today's meal, I began the long day of making Red Velvet Cake from scatch. I am quite the little Betty Crocker these days it appears. Not only did I make Red Velvet Cake from scratch, I also made the buttermilk to go in it! (Ok so it was just adding one tablespoon of vinegar to milk and letting it sit for 10 minutes but still!) I then continued to make Buttercream Frosting and the actual cake..I ran out of food coloring though so it is more a brown-red than red but oh well...maybe next time! By the way, if anyone can tell me how to sift flour properly (Mom!) please let me know. It seems like it would make quite a mess and while I sifted it, I did make a mess and I don't even know if it was worth "sifting." I prepared my cake, baked it, then placed it in the fridge to cool then came the real fun! I was making Red Velvet Cake Balls! I crumbled up all of my cake minus a little that I cut hearts out of (again to show that of course my heart is bigger and more full of love than Soner's) and mixed in the buttercream frosting to make tons and tons of little balls which I then froze. (This is quite a long process by the way.) After frozen, I coated those suckers in melted chocolate and again let them cool. I rock by the way! I made awesome Red Velvet Cake Balls! They were delicious and wonderful and perfect.




Yesterday was quite a long day of cooking but it was all so much fun and worth it because Soner seemed to really enjoy it. We had steak skewers I had marinated before and the Tabouli for dinner with a Eggplant-Yogurt sauce I had made also which came out very lumpy but didn't taste terrible. And for dessert the wonderful Red Velvet Cake Balls. It was perfect AND I took lots and lots of pictures of the baking process so Enjoy!